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How to save money on your eCommerce website build (so you can sleep better at night)

Christian Bodine on March 16, 2022

Creating an eCommerce website can be an expensive proposition. Not only do you need to pay for the design and development of the website, but you also need to pay for hosting and domain registration.

However, there are ways to save money on your eCommerce website build. By following these tips, you can save money on your eCommerce website build and get a website that looks great and functions well.

Do Some of the Work Yourself

One way to save money on your eCommerce website build is to do some of the work yourself.

There are a number of tasks that you can do yourself, such as creating product descriptions, setting up shipping labels, and creating coupons.

Get Help from an eCommerce Partner

If you have a small- to medium-sized business, there are likely some tasks that your team doesn’t have enough time or expertise to do. When it comes to getting your eCommerce website off the ground or improving and maintaining it, this is where an agency partner can help.

An eCommerce partner will take care of all of the heavy lifting so that you can focus on your core competencies. Plus, if you hire a full-service eCommerce agency, like Classy Llama, they’ll be able to take care of your design, development, marketing, and strategy all in one place.

Agencies will typically offer either a managed solution or an unmanaged solution. With a managed solution, the partner takes care of pretty much everything for you. With an unmanaged solution, you’ll be responsible for more tasks, but the partner will likely help you develop a strategy and lay out a plan to get your eCommerce business up and running.

You can use an eCommerce agency in combination with other tips mentioned in this article. For example, if you create product descriptions yourself, an eCommerce partner can either edit them or write them from the ground up.

The lift your eCommerce agency partner provides you can save money by freeing you up to work on more important tasks, and also help you avoid problems like your website going down, resulting in lost revenue.

Be Frugal With Your Photography

You can save time and money on your eCommerce website build by using stock photography and graphics instead of hiring a professional photographer or taking the photos yourself. Any time you need photos that aren’t custom to what you’re selling, you can find photos to use on a number of websites with high-quality, royalty-free stock photos and graphics. This will allow you to get the same quality as a professional photographer, but for a fraction of the cost and time.

Choose Your eCommerce Platform Wisely

When it comes to eCommerce platforms, there are a lot of providers to choose from. However, not all providers are created equal. Some providers are more customizable than others, some have a better track record of providing quality eCommerce solutions, and some are only the right fit for the right size of business.

Choosing the right eCommerce platform provider will save you time and money on development costs. The provider will have already built the necessary infrastructure and will be able to get your website up and running quickly and efficiently. Additionally, the provider will be able to offer support and assistance with ongoing site maintenance.

Check out Classy Llama’s work with two eCommerce platforms here:

BIG COMMERCE
ADOBE COMMERCE (FORMERLY MAGENTO)

Keep Page Number to a Minimum

When it comes to developing and hosting a website, one of the best ways to save money is to keep the number of pages on your website to a minimum. This will help to reduce development and hosting costs. Additionally, it will also help your website to load more quickly, which is important for keeping your customers happy.

Remember, you don’t need to include every page on your website in order to have a successful online presence. Focus on the most important pages and leave the rest for later. You can always add more pages as your business grows.

Discover the Wonders of Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) is a tool that allows you to manage the content on your website without needing to know how to code. A CMS will allow you to add, delete, and edit pages on your website quickly and easily. This can be a great way to keep your website up-to-date with the latest products and promotions.

There are a number of different CMS platforms to choose from, each with its own set of features and benefits. Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento are all popular CMS platforms that are well suited for eCommerce websites.

When choosing a CMS platform, be sure to consider the needs of your business. If you need a lot of customization or if you have a lot of products, it may be better to use a more customizable platform. If you want simplicity and to get started quickly, then a more turnkey solution may be right for you.

Your Money Saving Future

Running an eCommerce business can be expensive, and the idea of building and running a website for your brand may give you a budget panic attack, but it doesn’t have to. Try these money savings tips and, if you really need some help, reach out to us here at Classy Llama. We’re always here to help eCommerce businesses like yours optimize their strategy and create wins for your brand.

Signifyd Protects a Timeless Brand

Christian Bodine on September 9, 2021

Overview

  • Signifyd Customer Since: 2019
  • Solution: Revenue Protection, specifically Guaranteed Fraud Protection
  • Customer Synopsis: Precious Moments is known around the world for their carefully curated gifts and inspiring, timeless collectibles featuring soulful illustrations of children with teardrop-shaped eyes. Today, their customers count on them for high-quality, meaningful collections that they continue to treasure and proudly display.

Problems

It was this commitment to providing a strong customer experience and maintaining a strong brand reputation that led Classy Llama to recommend Signifyd to Precious Moments in 2019. 

As with most retailers maintaining traditional order review methods, Precious Moments was running into pressure on its manual review side of the house, grappling with nearly a 50% manual review rate on incoming orders and slow turnaround time on order fulfillment. It was at this point that Classy Llama connected Precious Moments with Signifyd to help mitigate their fraud challenges and protect the timeless brand’s reputation. 

What We Did

With Signifyd’s Guaranteed Fraud Protection, Precious Moments has eliminated chargeback losses from their business while simultaneously decreasing order decline rates by 90%. With Signifyd preventing chargebacks and the business disruption that can come with them, Precious Moments has seen a sharp decrease in claims and an 8% uptick in average monthly GMV.

  • 8% increase in GMV
  • 97% decrease in Chargeback Rate
  • 90% decrease in Decline Rate

Creating an Improved Experience for Precious Moments

Christian Bodine on August 8, 2021

Overview

Precious Moments is known around the world for their carefully curated gifts and timeless collectibles. Their customers count on them for high-quality, meaningful collections that they treasure and proudly display.

As a long-standing client of Classy Llama, we’ve had the pleasure of seeing Precious Moments grow their online presence, continually looking for opportunities to showcase their well-loved products and better serve their shoppers.

Recently, Precious Moments focused on upgrading their website to optimize the online experience for both B2C and B2B customers. 

Problems

Prior to this project, Precious Moments had a site built primarily on Magento 1 that had been implemented in 2012. Although the platform has served its purpose extremely well over the years, it became outdated and reached “end-of-life” in 2020.

As they considered replatforming their site, the primary goals were to simplify implementation and maintenance, and allow them to scale into the future. They were especially interested in a solution that would provide a lower total cost of ownership moving forward. BigCommerce was quickly chosen as their new platform, and Classy Llama was eager to help make this a smooth transition for everyone involved. 

Objectives

During the replatforming project, Precious Moments had some significant enhancements they were excited to implement into their new site. These enhancements were focused on creating a more personalized experience for customers, present and future, as well as reducing pain points for their internal teams by creating “easy-to-use” site admin tools; especially related to marketing. 

Classy Llama was tasked with providing a more contemporary look and feel for the sites, ensuring that they are built with “mobile first” in mind. They also prioritized including additional features and integrations, such as an optimized Site Search, “Find a Retailer” features, implementing Customer Loyalty / Rewards Program, creating Custom Reports options, and utilizing a Collector’s Club Program for their loyal customers.

What We Did 

In a short amount of time, Precious Moments was able to replatform from Magento 1 to BigCommerce. This allowed the Classy Llama team to develop the key features that would help deliver an incredible experience for their customers, while eliminating friction for the Precious Moments team. 

Streamline & Optimize B2B Experience

For their B2B customers, we utilized the customer groups functionality in BigCommerce to drive several things, including B2B pricing, B2B product restrictions, and a custom landing page specifically for B2B customers. To simplify the B2B user management, we incorporated custom forms needed for offline approval of new customer accounts. Building on top of our custom app for managing the Club memberships, we created a tool to allow B2B customers to look up member accounts without having to contact Precious Moments. 

Addition of PO Payment Method

For Purchase Order support, we enabled a PO payment method, which allows B2B customers to choose “Purchase Order” as a payment method and enter a PO number at checkout. This feature is restricted to B2B customer accounts only. 

Exclusive Customer Product & Pricing Segmentation

Customer groups allowed use to enable restricted products, bundling, and pricing based on the customer log-in. This segmentation allows a single site to be used for B2C customers, internal sales reps, and third-party distributors. By enabling exclusive products and pricing to be displayed to retail partners only, the fulfillment process was streamlined significantly. The B2C site now excludes all third-party customizable products, Chapel and Direct exclusive products which are solely available for B2B accounts.

Customer Loyalty Program Integration

The customer loyalty program allowed Precious Moments to create deeper relationships with their frequent shoppers, incentivizing them to return for future purchases. Their new Collector’s Club Program created an enticing and new way to showcase collections to those loyal customers, enabling them to complete collections using visual merchandising. 

How It Made a Difference

The BigCommerce implementation provided a sleek, modernized offering that allows customers to easily find and order products from any device. The B2B segmentation created a smooth transition between account types and product offerings. Precious Moments is now able to offer a highly personalized and tailored experience for each of their customers, without being bogged down by irrelevant options or pricing. 

The cost for the new site is lower, and the overhead required to manage customer accounts has been reduced significantly. The Precious Moments team has been able to reallocate those tedious hours of work to focus on creating more unique offerings. The renewed focus on customer loyalty allows them to create more return customers than ever before, with a higher average order value per user. 

Three Ways BigCommerce is “Thinking Big”

Christian Bodine on November 6, 2019

Three Ways BigCommerce is “Thinking Big”

At the end of October, BigCommerce hosted its Partner Summit in Austin, TX. I flew down early to hang out in ATX, and Jordan, our BigCommerce Solutions Architect, joined me in time for the event.

The BigCommerce Partner Summit offered an overview of the eCommerce platform’s direction, its competitive advantages, and a series of workshops that helped sharpen the skills and knowledge of its partners.

The summit kicked off with a keynote from BigCommerce CEO, Brent Bellm. This session turned out to be my favorite of the whole event. In less than an hour, Bellm summarized the eCommerce market with clarity and crystallized BC’s strongest selling points: 

  • Built for growth
  • Industry-leading performance
  • Cross-channel commerce
  • Lower total cost of ownership

The Disruptive Innovation Model

Brent framed the BigCommerce competitive position from the perspective of the Disruptive Innovation Model. This model, coined by Brent’s Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, describes the way in which a product or service gains footing by offering a solution to the bottom of the market, then steadily moves upmarket while retaining its commitment downmarket.

Source: Clayton M. Christensen, Michael Raynor, and Rory McDonald

BigCommerce has shed its reputation of being “just for small companies” and is now taking the lead in bringing cutting-edge technologies to SaaS eCommerce.

With each innovation and update, they don’t just create a more compelling product for mid-market and enterprise merchants; they also make world-class commerce experiences accessible for micro-merchants at their lowest rate (just $30/month).

As the day progressed, the BigCommerce team hosted sessions that informed partners like Classy Llama of the specific features BigCommerce is creating to serve merchants of all sizes.

For this post, I want to share more about how BigCommerce is “thinking Big.”

Below are three areas that show how BigCommerce is a strong choice for mid-market and enterprise merchants.

Headless Experiences

Headless architecture is one of the biggest trends in eCommerce right now. This is because brands are digging deeper into offering unique, branded experiences through their sites.

Headless as a concept basically means that the merchant’s eCommerce features are decoupled from the front-end, as well as other parts of the brand’s online architecture.

The brand is free to build their site on the CMS of their choice (WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, Gatsby, etc.) and plug pieces of the BigCommerce platform like cart, catalog, and checkout wherever they need it.

When headless, brand’s online architecture can be a network of independent micro services communicating with one another in any way the brand desires.

BigCommerce is enabling merchants and agencies to build unique headless experiences with their platform as an eCommerce hub. 

One can’t talk about headless without talking about APIs. APIs are used to connect applications and let them pass information between each other.

Historically, REST was the standard for web-based APIs. GraphQL is a newer and more robust architecture for APIs designed by Facebook. To avoid getting too technical, I’ll say this: REST was released in 2000 and GraphQL in 2015. The internet has changed a lot in those 15 years, and GraphQL is an API solution designed for our modern web. 

BigCommerce’s support of GraphQL is in beta. The end result will be even more data than what was previously available through their REST APIs. Not only will there be more data to get, but there will be better control of what data is called for and received, making applications faster and more efficient. 

This future of BigCommerce with GraphQL makes it easy to imagine endless possibilities of headless configurations with BigCommerce as the eCommerce engine.

Multi

Multi-currency, multi-language, multi-brand, multi-channel, multi-store. With Multi, BigCommerce is continuing to push the limits of what’s possible on a SaaS eCommerce platform.

There are a lot of scenarios where multi makes sense. A single brand with multiple locales, multiple brands with a single storefront, multiple brands with separate stores, a single storefront with multiple currencies; there are a lot of possibilities.

Currently, BigCommerce supports multi-currency and multi-brand. This empowers merchants with scenarios like multiple brands on a single storefront, or a single storefront with multiple currencies.

Additionally, BigCommerce offers multi-channel support, equipping merchants with the tools to connect their catalogs to Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Google Shopping from a single dashboard.

One of the greatest areas of possibility for BigCommerce is multi-storefront.

Right now the only way to accomplish that is by having multiple instances of BigCommerce, with completely separate admin panels. This means, without any added custom integrations, everything between the stores is managed separate from each other. This is changing, though.

Multi-language and multi-storefront support are being expanded. Site owners will soon have the power to control global and site-specific settings, as well as manage products, customers, and more at a central location. For both implementation and ongoing support, this is going to save merchants a lot of time, energy, and money.

B2B

BigCommerce continues to excel when serving merchants who have B2B needs. 

As a whole, BigCommerce takes a unique approach to their feature roadmap and selection. They invest heavily into the support and improvement of their core platform and the enablement of partners to build upon it. This is an alternative to other platforms constantly adding new revenue streams and services, leading to feature bloat as they move upmarket.

Natively, BigCommerce can support large catalogs and offers customer and pricing segmentation down to the SKU level. Over the next year, improvements to customer account management are a focus, as well as account security features. Additionally, purchase orders are expected to be a native feature in 2020.

Through their partner network, many more of the usual suspects for B2B sites are supported. Punch out, net payment terms, advanced shipping, and re-ordering are all available through trusted third party extensions. Additionally, many integrations with major ERP, OMS and CRM systems are pre-built and ready to connect with minimal effort.

BigCommerce offers B2B sellers a consumer-like user experience and the flexibility and features they need. 

Conclusion

There’s no denying that BigCommerce has a compelling offer for merchants seeking the benefits of SaaS for eCommerce. What I find most exciting is how they continue to push the envelope on what’s possible for merchants with complex requirements. More and more, merchants are seeing that BigCommerce’s offering of “Open SaaS” for eCommerce isn’t a game of trade-offs, it’s a new world of opportunity, with a well-engineered core platform and a powerful network of partners. We’re proud to be one of those partners and love the value BigCommerce brings to our clients.

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